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Calais, a project sponsored by Reuters offers a few handy plugins that enable you to use its API to auto-tag all the posts in your blog (see our coverage). It goes through your content, extracts the relevant keywords, and adds those as tags in your CMS.

But Open Calais isn't open source. Here are a few open source tools you can use to extract key terms from text. As far as I know, none have been turned into CMS plugins... yet.

The extent to which social media sites like Twitter and Facebook play a role in the recent political uprisings in Tunisa, Egypt, Bahrain and so on continues to be a source of debate. What is more clear, however, is that the major languages of these regions are not well-served by electronic resources that make text analysis of these documents and data possible.

But now computer scientists have developed the first software system that will allow for the processing of documents in Urdu, the national language of Pakistan and one of the five most-spoken languages in the world.

This week, an IBM supercomputer dubbed Watson took on Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a competition, pitting natural language processing and machine learning versus two Jeopardy champions. The three-day tournament ended on Wednesday with Watson soundly whooping its competitors. Now that it's over you might wonder how it was done. What problems did the team behind Watson run into along the way? What's next?

If you head on over to social bookmarking site Reddit, you can ask them yourself. The site has gotten the IBM research team behind Watson to agree to hold a Q&A with Redditors and is fielding questions for the next several days.

Semantic search engine Hakia today announced a set of APIs that opens up their natural language processing and search platform to developers. Hakia's Syndication Web Services really comes in two parts: search queries, which allow developers to add web search functionality leveraging Hakia's five billion page index, and XML feed calls, which give developers access to Hakia's underlying natural language processing technology. The latter of the two is clearly the more compelling of the offerings.